Where Washington’s power elite meet, often on the taxpayer’s dime.

Last week my parents came to visit, and we had lunch in Tysons Corner, Virginia, located right along the infamous Washington Beltway.

We passed the new Adaire luxury tower, which cast a shadow over the dual Bentley/Aston Martin dealership, with a Tesla store in the background and a Porsche dealer across the street. It is all, directly or indirectly, financed by the American taxpayer. We ate at a restaurant in the ground floor of a modest office building, but had to trek up and down a six-story parking garage to the “customer parking,” even though the entire garage was empty—reserved, perhaps, for the bigwigs who never show up to work. We needed a few things at Wal-Mart (surprisingly, there is one here), and I had to explain that the parking lot in front of Wal-Mart is not actually for Wal-Mart, and that, if you are coming from your car, the store has to be entered from the top level of yet another parking garage.

“If Kim Jong-Un is going to drop a nuclear bomb,” my dad remarked, “it should be on Tysons Corner.”

Tysons is an easy target for anger, with its combination of ostentatious wealth and its utter lack of coherent planning or design. It is the very archetype of ugly American sprawl: neither truly suburban, in which a leisurely drive or stroll down a sidewalk is at least in theory possible, nor truly urban, with all of the cheek-by-jowl rough-and-tumble life and character of a city. Tysons Corner instead consists of miles of grim concrete big-box stores, parking garages, flashy towers, garish office blocks, and decaying mid-century kitsch, all lining an expanse of 10-lane expressways that will kill you instantly if you crane your neck toward the dismal view for more than a second. It is the visual equivalent of putting a Beethoven symphony and a Metallica concert in a blender and piecing them back together at random.

None of this, of course, negates the reality that there is plenty of poverty, some of it desperate, right in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. For example, there are the inner-ring suburbs of southern Maryland, largely decaying time-capsules of the 1950s which might be largely abandoned if not for people left behind by the 2008 financial crisis, low-wage workers who likely spend their days servicing their wealthy neighbors, and a deluge of poor immigrants, not all of them legal. These pockets of poverty only make the bloat and waste of the government—and its symbiosis with the sprawling, ever-increasing network of contractors, consultants, lawyers, and establishment media organs—more shameful. It is not as if these counties are rich through a roll of the dice: it is rather through what James Howard Kunstler calls “asset-stripping”—the matrix of financialization, offshoring, and an ever-increasing “Deep State” bureaucracy.

If the government should ever shrink, if the financial system should ever truly collapse, or if the military industrial complex stopped turning, this whole region would be depopulated. The “Alexandria” of The Walking Dead might prove prophetic. Without the steady flow of federal dollars, the 10-lane superhighways, luxury apartment towers, those kitschy mid-century diners, not to mention most of Loudoun and Clarke counties, would make Detroit look like a boomtown.

Much has been written about the problem of economic inequality, and whether it really is a problem. Conservatives are correct that simply being rich does not, in and of itself, hurt the poor. But does anyone think it’s helpful for a nation’s ruling class to live in such an ostentatious bubble? These are not just “the rich,” with their inherited fortunes and leisurely yacht cruises. Many of these wealthy Beltway earners have jobs that in theory are connected to the public interest, but which in practice approach a self-perpetuating racket. It is imperative that they understand the country and the people they serve, and that requires some element of economic equality. Just as important is a willingness to explore the country’s great geographical and social diversity.

For example, how many of the Tysons crowd know that the scars left by the financial collapse are still quite visible? I drove through Maryland’s Eastern Shore last year, where I came across an old convenience shop on the side of the road, well-kept but utterly abandoned. A man who lived next door told me that it had been a family-owned business since the ’50s, but had closed amid the crisis. There will likely never be a business on that site again. There may not even be money for demolition. And if it ever is demolished, it certainly won’t be replaced with a Bentley dealership.

Or how many of our elite know that Wal-Mart is now in aggressive competition with dollar stores, which are proliferating like vermin in the shells of buildings which once housed neighborhood groceries, drug stores, and five-and-dimes? How many understand what that means, how it impacts the texture of everyday life for ordinary Americans? Standing in line at Dollar Tree is not the same as being waited on at the Tysons Corner Center Bloomingdale’s.

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29 Responses to Tysons Corner, the Bubble Inside the Beltway Bubble

If you come to the southwest of the country and get off the interstate, driving the secondary roads through the small towns, you will see this in microcosm. You will see the towns where there are many boarded up shops, homes in evident disrepair, junker cars everywhere. But in most towns you will find one or two shiny new opulent buildings. These buildings are almost invariably either government buildings (state government as often as federal) or health care facilities.

You could have made a good point about how contracting is expanding our budget, and that big name contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, and Boeing are costing the government vastly more than we need to, taking the jobs from government workers that could do the exact same work for much less money. Instead you just say “big government” and don’t think anywhere past that.

News Flash: It wasn’t the national security state which hollowed out all the little towns in America (although they it didn’t help), it was moving all the industrial base to China and Mexico which really put the final nail in the coffin. All across America, where the company town once ruled, there is no jobs that pay, that is unless you were lucky enough to get trained and certified in something that used brains more than brawn.

Regarding the fact that these counties are wealthy: to be honest, counties with a lot of government work should be wealthy if you look at the median wealth. There should be very few poor people, a lot of people making a good middle-class income, and basically no really rich people. I.e., socialism. That’s what government work is.

What gets me is that this story clearly is about people not just making a middle class living from government work, but people getting rich from government work. That, in my humble opinion, should not happen.

@Nova, there is a cap on civil service workers. Adding more means additional long term government pensions. The same goes for military members. So in order for the massive machine to keep running they hire contractors. Contractors, on average, receive more pay now in exchange for no retirement later. In the end they can be fired or the contract not renewed. The government itself realizes how hard it is to let go of civil servants once they are hired. And the average American knows how unproductive those government employees are. So be careful for what you wish for. If the rest of America had their say then you would see the civil servants fired and replaced with fewer contractors.

I shop on a regular basis at Dollar Stores. As do most folks in our community.
I don’t see how the comparison to “vermin” applies. I can buy the same items there offered at Wal-Mart, but for a buck or less.
I agree that much of Northern Virginia’s a mess for sure, but Dollar Stores are a wonderful resource and the impact they have on my financial “texture of life” is beneficial, not negative.
You know, I worked in a family owned gift shop and virtually every item sold was manufactured in China. We were instructed to remove the Made in China stickers before putting the merchandise out on the shelf.
I guess the more elite and affluent buy products from China unawares and everyday folk buy them at Dollar Stores with transparency.

I am surprised by the call for nuclear destruction of an urban area because the area is unplanned and contains wealth. I am not surprised that there are fancy stores and restaurants where rich people live; in my book “the elite”=the rich. It is not clear to me from the article who these people who deserve nuclear bombs and zombie attacks are; do GSA bureaucrats buy Teslas?
I do agree that money plays too large a role in our political life. I am worried that attempts to limit this runs into constitutional problems.

Steve Bannon to Charlie Rose: “The swamp is 50 years in the making…The swamp is a business model, a successful business model. It’s a donor, consultant, K Street lobbyist, politician — seven of the nine biggest, wealthiest counties in America ring Washington, D.C. For the first time in history, the per capita income in those counties is higher than Silicon Valley…The permanent political class as represented by both parties…People still think in a left-right continuum or a Republican and Democrat continuum. While you continue to think that way, you’re not seeing what the real story is. The real story is economic nationalism and populism on the left and the right versus a permanent political class which Hillary Clinton represented. That swamp, you’re not going to drain that in eight months. You’re not going to drain it in two terms. This is going to take, 10, 15, 20 years of relentlessly going after it.”

But when I get impatient, Mr. Del Mastro, I’m right there with your dad.

This is a truly strange perspective on Tyson’s corner. While there are genuinely wealthy lobbyists and corporate lawyers in McLean, the Tyson’s area is pretty much the embodiment of middle class modernity in its grossest sense. Tyson’s is fed by consumers and workers from the more distant suburbs in Loudoun and Prince William Counties made up of David Brooksian “Patio Men” with engineering degrees and veterans holding security clearances that allow them to pursue some kind of random administrative function within a defense industry context.

I live in NYC, so you will excuse me if I am not shocked by a county full of engineers in polo shirts and khakis making 90k-120k/yr. it’s not a testimony to the grossness of wealth. It’s a testimony to the mediocrity of every day life in middle class, white collar suburban America.

At least unlike Bentonville, Arkansas, those workers and middle managers are not becoming wealthy off of American poverty. The worst that can be said of the is that an awful lot of government contractors talk about how they are libertarians.

Every time I visit my daughter in the South Riding area of Loudoun County, I am evermore reminded of the expanding federal bureaucracy largess. The only thing I am attracted to in Tyson’s is the L.L. Bean store where I normally order my cotton dress shirts and Khaki pants. It’s a material world in Tyson’s!

…and yet, numbers show that today’s Federal Government is the smallest (relative to the size of the U.S. population) in decades. This saw is getting rather dull in the tooth. The American Conservative can do better.

This is one of the most nakedly ideological posts I’ve ever seen. The strategy, as best as I can make out, is to direct resentment and anger at politicians and public servants, rather than the people who are very obviously pulling the strings. This is obviously a strategy of misdirection, which raises the question of what venal motivation lies behind it.

The “ruling class” is not in Washington DC, it is in Manhattan. Or wherever Sheldon Adelson’s wheelchair is currently located. If you think Tyson’s Corner is obscene, you should visit New York sometime. That would quickly cure you of the impression that this statistic about the “greatest concentration of wealth” translates into anything about the moral significance of concentrations of wealth.

Someone just above quoted Steve Bannon, the great populist of our time. Let’s talk about Steve Bannon then. His whole political career right now exists because of Robert and Rebekah Mercer. Robert Mercer is a hedge fund billionaire, a former computer scientist specializing in high-level quantitative finance. He was the number 1 donor to federal candidates in 2016.

There does not appear to be a lot of interest here in Robert Mercer. But there does seem to be a lot of interest in middle class bureaucrats, who — let’s be honest — are really not an inherently interesting subject.

The biggest problem with the “ruling class” is their collective mediocrity. People don’t mind, actually they enjoy, a sophisticated “upper class” that they can live vicariously through, but our beltway types are basically criminal morons & rent seekers.

Americans respect “captains of industry”, even silicon valley types to an extent. All that DC does is fail and sell out the country, comparatively.

Not anymore. The old CSRS pension system was closed off to new entrants over 30 years ago. The current FERS plan relies primarily on social security and a 401K-style program like the private sector. At this time there is still a (greatly reduced) 3rd-tier pension remnant in FERS as an incentive to get people to stay on, but the current administration may do away with that altogether.

One of the reasons for this transition was to make it easier for employees to come and go in the public sector w/o being trapped there for an entire career by their pension system. I can recall us trying to hire people into federal jobs back in the early 1980s, and when we explained how the pension system worked they just laughed at us and said “who would want that?” – before going off to become contractors.

With respect to federal workers vs private contractors, I’ve seen good and bad in both of them. You can’t judge either as a class; when it comes to employees – and organizations, you’ve got to take then one at a time.

I used to live in the area, and Tyson’s Corner was a foreign land to me. Its on the Orange line now, but didn’t used to be, and its still an expensive trip. I’ve also lived in one of those decaying Maryland suburbs, and shopped further south, because you can’t find a good Sav-A-Lot in DC proper, nor an ALDI, not even a Shopper’s Warehouse. Tyson’s Corner sounds like a prototype for the building Phil Ochs sang about where the last of the bourgeois await the final consummation of revolution. Although it probably won’t be anything like that. It will just fade into obscurity as the economic winds shift, and end up a kind of banlieu where low income partially employed families squat in the concrete ruins, some thirty years from now.

As I write this, I am having conversations with retired and reserve servicemembers who cannot afford to accept Federal GS-12 and below positions because these jobs do not pay enough to live in the DC area. They are looking to be contractors.

Trump might wish to consider working with Congress to craft a bill that cuts contracting and, dare I say it here of all places, expands the Federal workforce (some contractors do necessary work). A bill like this would need to contain systemic reforms to the bureaucracy so that we can reduce incompetence (performance measures and testing for promotion, e.g.) and be made revenue neutral. Revenue neutral can be done by cuts to long-term benefits (let government workers buy healthcare on the market like the rest of us) and by cutting top level pay. Decreasing top pay and imposing performance measures promotion will help restore honor to government service and end the Clinton-Bush-Obama gilded age of the incompetent, wealthy federal worker.

And while we cut the top, we’d need to increase entry-level pay just enough to allow workers like the servicemembers I’ve been speaking with afford to live in DC, and continue their service to their country.

Decreasing top pay and imposing performance measures promotion will help restore honor to government service and end the Clinton-Bush-Obama gilded age of the incompetent, wealthy federal worker.

Who are these wealthy federal workers? I feel sorry for the government because I was a comparatively good deal as a federal employee, until they couldn’t keep me on, at which time I left for a federal contractor who paid me a lot more money.

The drive to privatize/contract out so much labor is also influenced by the fact that contractors are not bound by the Hatch Act and thus can raise money for politicians and aren’t bound by laws against partisan activities.

There are lobbyists and fundraisers telling your local representatives to hire contractors and to privatize federal jobs. There are laws against advocating in favor of the federal workforce.

The wealthy people are the ones who own the contracting companies, run the lobbying firms that lobby to send money to those contracting companies, and handle the legal contracts for those contractors. Everyone else is just doing the 1 hour commute on the congested DC highways to get to the shlubby job at a government contractor.

A good friend of mine has a son who works as a private contractor in DC. He barely scrapes by after paying rent and living expenses and shares an apartment with three other young men.
I know that there are some very affluent neighborhoods in DC , MD and NoVA but as Tyro said, many other folks are just getting by. Which might explain the proliferation of dollar stores.

“Revenue neutral can be done by cuts to long-term benefits (let government workers buy healthcare on the market like the rest of us) and by cutting top level pay. Decreasing top pay and imposing performance measures promotion will help restore honor to government service and end the Clinton-Bush-Obama gilded age of the incompetent, wealthy federal worker.
”

1. “Most of us” get our insurance not via “the market” but via their employer. Just like federal employees. Now, they get a good deal, because their employer is large and powerful – but that’s just an argument for single payer.
2. We actually have data on “rich federal employees.” Federal employees with high school degrees (say mailmen), make more than their private sector counterparts. Federal employees with BAs do about the same, all things consider. People with graduate degrees do much better on the private sector (but enjoy less job security). So let’s be honest: when people complain about rich government workers, their complaint is that teachers and mailmen and sanitation workers dare make middle class living.

I lived and worked in Tysons Corner, Va from 1972 to 1978 and had working relationships with politicians and The President’s Press secretary in Florida at the Racquet Club on Miami Beach and Jockey Club and Palms bay Club and their yachts. These stories sound very familiar

TR,
That’s very interesting about the Nashville Symphony Hall. Thank you.
You can find amazing stuff at the Dollar Store. Our local one offers Yardley’s lavender soap & Jamaican patties.
Many teachers pick up their school supplies there. And really decent birthday cards are only 2 for a buck.

The ONE thing that gets taken for granted in America, by the government, is the willingness of American WORKERS to leave their homes and exchange their efforts for the OPPORTUNITY to improve their lives. If a united effort was made, to save enough to collectively take one month off from work, it MIGHT convince our electeds that we have awakened, and we are demanding that we be returned to the top of this country’s priority list, ahead of corporations and allies. You know, they way republics do…..

The article identifies the cause: “thanks to the ginormous federal bureaucracy and National Security State which has grown exponentially since the 9/11 attacks.” But concludes with the “elected officials are out of touch” rhetoric. It’s the military industrial complex creating this issue, not elitism. Not new (See e.g., Eisenhower speech). $700 billion in defense spending ain’t going into the pocket of those serving. End profiteering from government contracts, and the swamp will change.

The big explosion in growth — especially around places like Tysons Corners — started happening under Reagan as a consequence of privatization of the federal services (a process that continued equally aggressively under Clinton and George W. Bush). Public employees get knocked routinely, but the ones that I grew up around weren’t exactly living large. Many were WWII vets who went to school on the GI Bill, lived in fairly modest single family homes. The advantage of privatization from a political perspective is that it offers an easier way to finance political campaigns. Private firms have the ability to spend more money. Additionally, when politicians retire or get voted out of office, or when underpaid staffers walk through the revolving door, privatization creates a very lucrative fall-back. Some of the lucrative local industries are also focused on shutting down regulations and limiting enforcement. e.g. Koch funded American’s for Prosperity has more employees now than the RNC.

At the core, it’s about the bidding war over policy. If money played less of a role, you would probably see a more representative process and fewer pockets of massive wealth concentration. It’s ironic that Charles Murray would criticize the system too — he’s been a major beneficiary of it.